Our View: Naloxone helps prevent deaths by overdose

Thursday

Feb 20, 2014 at 6:00 PM

For too long, most people who didn't know the victims of heroin overdoses just shrugged off their deaths as the inevitable result of their bad decisions. They blamed the victims for their addiction and blamed the drugs for their deaths.

For too long, most people who didn’t know the victims of heroin overdoses just shrugged off their deaths as the inevitable result of their bad decisions. They blamed the victims for their addiction and blamed the drugs for their deaths.

But nobody deserves to die of a heroin overdose, just as no one deserves to die of a heart attack. An overdose is a mistake in taking the drug, and it doesn’t have to be a fatal one. A drug, administered quickly, can make the difference between surviving an overdose and dying from one.

The drug is naloxone, marketed as Narcon, and it has been used in hospital emergency rooms for years. Naloxone, often administered as a nasal spray, can reverse a heroin or opioid overdose.

On Thursday, Fall River Mayor Will Flanagan asked DPH for permission for Fall River police officers to carry naloxone.

Over the past several years, pilot programs have put naloxone in the hands of first responders — ambulance crews, police and firefighters — in several Massachusetts cities, including Fall River and Taunton, with impressive results: As of October 2013, departments had reported more than 300 overdoses reversed.

The pilot program run through the Massachusetts Department of Public Health has trained and encouraged another kind of “first responder” — drug users, their friends and family members who may be present when an overdose occurs. Their naloxone interventions have resulted in the reversal of more than 2,300 overdoses.

This week, in Taunton, a city that has been plagued with a shocking number of heroin overdoses — 67 just since the start of the year, as of Wednesday — Seven Hills Behavioral Health Foundation has been sending in a “mobile street outreach” team twice a week to get the life-saving overdose antidote into the hands of drug users and their families.

Meanwhile, U.S. Sen. Edward Markey has asked federal health officials what it would take to expand emergency responder and “bystander” naloxone programs nationwide.

Local, state and federal officials should embrace this live-saving treatment. Just as, a decade or more ago, heart defibrillators moved from hospitals to ambulances, school gyms and private fitness centers, naloxone should be available wherever a drug overdose happens.

Opioid and heroin addiction is difficult to treat, but not impossible. In Massachusetts and across the nation, officials are at last talking about improving access to treatment for addicts instead of just locking them up for longer sentences.

One need only hear the words of a Taunton mother whose daughter was revived from an overdose on the sidewalk of Charlton Memorial Hospital in Fall River to understand the life-saving value of naloxone: “If you keep her alive, that’s all that matters,” said Susan Malloch-Taylor, whose daughter is working on recovering from her heroin addiction. “I thank God for every day that my daughter is still alive. … I’m all for anything that is going to keep these kids alive until they are ready for help. Every parent of a heroin addict living in their house should have Narcan.”

An emphasis on “harm-reduction” makes sense with such a wide-scale public health emergency. In that context, giving first responders — including emergency personnel, police and even friends and family members of addicts — the tools they need to prevent fatal overdoses is an easy call.